If Elvis was all about pelvis, Peaches is all about crotch

Girls cry, pull at their hair in barefaced anguish, faint, scream and convulse like crazed zealots. Why? What in all of God’s green goodness could elicit such a reaction? That’s right, it’s, it’s…Elvis! and what you’re watching is footage of one of his early concerts. As he gyrated those hips above his delirious minions, the sexual energy he exuded was so overwhelming, so blatant, and so new — the girls just couldn’t contain themselves.

Ear splitting shrieks of wild passion don’t exactly happen these days. But that isn’t for lack of boundaries, or artists trying to break through them. Case in point: Peaches. As sex saturated as today’s pop culture is, there’s still a mantle of propriety in the world of the popular arts, and if probed in the right way, our sensibilities can still be quite tender to the touch. It is Peaches’ purpose to probe ya right where it hurts.

If Elvis was all about pelvis, Peaches is all about crotch; as in unshaven, dirty, bruised, capital “C” crotch. While Elvis made it possible for a singer to have real sex appeal, Peaches wants real sex. She’s not about turning on the audience (note mullet, crotch hair, and armpit hair), but about wanting it and being completely unafraid of saying so. Onstage, Peaches spits, screams and cums all over conventions of female beauty and sexual propriety — even female emancipation. “Come on/ Hot rod / Give me / Your wad,” she yells, and “I’m only double A, but I’m thinkin’ triple X.” It might be un-PC, but Peaches likes it rough, and she’s going to tell you so with such bold extremity that she renders questions about political correctness and propriety irrelevant.

But Peaches’ exhortations to join in wild orgy never quite get through to her audience. Despite the urgency and passion that radiate from the Peach nether regions, the crowd remains the same culturally curious, musically well-groomed group that they were when they walked in. At a Peaches concert, there will be no writhing on the floor such as the kind elicited by Elvis. Nope, somewhere along the rock’n’roll line, the possibility of getting caught up in a lunatic sexual artistic revolution disappeared.

What happened? It’s simple, yet tragic: artistic insurrection itself became anesthetized, tamed into a style. Though Andy Warhol may not be solely responsible, he bears part of the blame, and he’s illuminating as to the, uh, evolution of revolution. Warhol made a point of being an enigma, of never making it exactly clear what his artistic goals were. It was that unknowable quality that drew people to him, and he knew it. “The thing is to think of nothing…nothing is exciting, nothing is sexy, nothing is not embarrassing,” he said. “The only time I ever want to be something is outside a party so I can get in.” Around the vague notion that Andy was doing something revolutionary (at the core of which was his nothingness) gathered the crowd that had to understand the un-understandable, to know the unknowable. Warhol took that group, the cognoscenti crème de la crème arbiters of taste, and incorporated them with the social world of the Factory, thereby interlocking style with high art, with “revolution”, incontrovertibly.

Though she may not want to be thought of as such, Peaches can’t escape being an inheritor of Warhol’s legacy; she’s a practitioner of sometimes mysterious and challenging high art (crotch hair + mullet = sexy?). Though her supposed goal is to address sexual issues, much like Warhol purported to address issues of commodification, she is co-opted by the machine of the in-crowd who silence debate about the real questions by turning her into an aesthetic. Warhol was aware of what was happening and capitalized on it, made it a part of his art. But Peaches just becomes a style for her audience to put on. They wear her like they wear ironic ’80s t-shirts. She is camp.

It does seem that the world of high art simply isn’t a place where revolution, sexual or otherwise, is any longer possible — if it ever was. After all, Elvis made waves in the world of pop, as opposed to high art, through an appeal to a mass crowd that Peaches cannot reach with her particular brand of unsexy sex. The sexuality of the Britney Spears “low art” world today is confined by notions of hotness (begun, it is true, by Elvis) that no one seems too eager to break out of just now.

The fact that Elvis was hot sexy, revolutionary and wildly popular all at once is a testament to the musical magic of the ’60s (and also to the more blatant mantle of propriety that was his for the ripping); experimental “high art” and popular “low art”, for such a brief period, were one and the same. There were undoubtedly polarizing “in-crowd” or high art groups in the ’60s who frowned on Elvis because he made music for the lowly masses. But today, that coterie of exclusivity that Warhol first made a point of cultivating is chased after by a much larger number of people than in Warhol’s day. These days, Peaches fills reasonably large venues all over the world. But with a large “in-crowd” and a huge group of “masses”, the extremes of high and low push further apart, creating shallow versions of each that are basically incapable of meaningful output.

So where are we now? Contemplating the camp of Peaches’ loins is interesting. But Elvis’s pelvis must have been a lot more fun.